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WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9670 [post_author] => 20 [post_date] => 2025-11-19 17:45:21 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-11-19 23:45:21 [post_content] => The Chorus Beneath Our Feet
Melanie Schnell
Radiant Press
Released October 2025

The inspiration for Melanie Schnell's latest novel came to her during a writers' retreat as an image: two women standing on the branch of an enormous tree in the middle of a storm. Schnell BEd'93 wasn't able to delve into the idea immediately, as she was finishing her first novel at the time, so she sketched the picture and set it aside. Over the next 12 years, she unpacked the drawing, doing research on trees and fungi, British Home Children, Norse mythology, post-traumatic stress disorder and more.

"The novel grew out of the primary image and a deep interest in what lies beneath us-skeletons, insects, roots, fungi-there is so much teeming beneath us that comprises our present and our past. Beneath us, our past impacts and informs our present. That's the research hole I went down," Schnell explains.

The result is The Chorus Beneath Our Feet, a genre-defying, beautifully written novel that intertwines the past and the present through the central image of a tree.

 

Beneath the tree lies the bodies of two siblings, a plot point that came out of the research Schnell did on mass graves-ones with Indigenous children who died at Residential Schools as well as ones found in other countries after wars have ended. One particular mass grave that caught her attention was in Ireland: a grave of infant remains found under a home for unwed mothers.

That led her to look into the story of the British Home Children, who were part of an emigration scheme that brought children from Britain across the ocean to work on Canadian prairie farms. "It began as benevolent but turned into self-interested moneymaking. A lot of terrible things happened-there was abuse and deaths-graves of British Home Children exist," Schnell explains. As one character in her novel succinctly states, "These children join the dark history of the Residential Schools as part of this country's shameful past." Part of the reason Schnell homed in on the story of the British Home Children is her own farm background. "I grew up on a farm and am a settler from a long line of farmers who came here from all over Europe, so I felt like I could relate to that small part of it," she says.

High up in the tree, literally living in its branches, is a mute, homeless woman named Mary. The tree speaks to her and tells her the story of the British Home Children buried below. After Mary finds herself at the centre of an investigation on the murder of an infant, she disappears. Her brother, Jes, an injured veteran who has just returned home from Afghanistan, searches for her, following the clues that she leaves to help him clear her name and unravel the mystery around the tree before it is slated to be cut down.

While the idea for the novel came easily, writing it was a challenge. Schnell had a bout of chronic illness that lasted several years and left her unable to read or write at times. She had to push through the illness in her daily life, as she was a full-time single mother who was climbing the academic ladder as a sessional English professor at the University of Regina. She also pushed through it to write the book. "It was very hard. Writing a novel is like a long-distance race. You need stamina to be able to come back to the idea day after day after day over time. When I was very ill and I came back to it after taking longer breaks, the thing had grown beyond me. Books have their own lives. I had to scramble to catch up to it, letting go of characters and discarding plot points," she says. "What do you do when you're a writer? These stories live in you, and you have to let them out into the world at some point, no matter how hard it is to tell them."

Schnell describes her writing process as 'chaos'., "I get an idea and scribble it down and try to get back to it when I can. Over time, scenes emerge, and I get obsessed and dig in and try to explore them. When I get about 40 pages, I keep working away at those pages for a long time. That's where I need an extended period of time-a writers' retreat, time away during the summer-to sit down and get the full draft out, go back and tweak it and polish it. I didn't have a regular daily practice, because before, with a chronic illness, I couldn't do much."

The more Schnell writes, the more she learns about writing, and she is happy to pass that on to her creative writing students at the U of R. She says teaching goes both ways: "It's about relationships-there's a give and take. I get a lot from my students as well. I've come across student writing that's incredible. I'm always impressed by someone who started as not a strong writer and by the end, they are one."

Schnell's first novel, While the Sun Is Above Us, was shortlisted for the Fiction Award and Book of the Year Award and won the Saskatchewan First Book Award and the City of Regina Award in 2013. The novel has been listed as part of the English language arts curriculum in both public and Catholic schools across Saskatchewan. "My books are in the high school library where my son attends. He and his friends leafed through the acknowledgements and noted that I thanked him as a toddler," she recalls. "I was pleasantly surprised when I found out they chose my book for the provincial curriculum. I'm hoping they'll look at my second book for that as well."

Everything Is Fine Here
Iryn Tushabe BFA'12, BJ'14
House of Anansi Press
Released April 2025

Everything Is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe BFA'12, BJ'14 tells the coming-of-age story of a young woman, Aine, whose sister, Mbabazi, comes out as a lesbian in a country where homosexuality is against the law and, in some cases, punishable by death. While the threat of Uganda's anti-homosexuality law looms, Mbabazi faces a devastating consequence that has an immediate impact on her and her family: she is shunned and disowned by her evangelical Christian mother.

Tushabe felt it was important to focus on repercussions in the family dynamic rather than the potential of violence-even when prospective agents and publishers recommended otherwise. "I get tired of queer Black people suffering all the time in these stories. People know about the anti-homosexuality law, so there's pressure to write about that and 'raise the stakes' to sell books. The news focuses on people perpetuating violence against queer people-the camera is trained at the police officers and the politicians. I thought, 'What if I turned the camera around and showed a queer couple and how this law is affecting their family?' This law not only affects queer people; it affects everybody," Tushabe explains. She wanted to focus on an aspect of queer life in Uganda that is not known. "Even persecuted people are going to be happy some of the time," she says "I think people are interested in seeing how these characters can have big dreams and fulfill them in this hostile environment. It's a better story than having them subjected to the threat of violence."

The inspiration for the novel came partly from Tushabe's own experience as a bisexual woman growing up under evangelical Christianity in Uganda. "It was my understanding that if you're attracted to women, that was something you had to pray away. I was always praying away my desires. It never worked. I was constantly depressed," she recalls. "The-very long-first draft was from my perspective and purged the anger and frustration I had from growing up in that environment. I was then able to step aside and let it be a calmer, more interesting story that focuses on a younger sibling instead of me."

The result is a love story-the story of love between sisters, between partners, and between the narrator and her homeland of Uganda, which is its own character with its vibrant landscape and wildlife. Despite the difficulties that all the characters face, the book is hopeful. "Aine is smarter than I ever was at her age in navigating the world," Tushabe says "She was able to read books I didn't read at that age, which made her not as strict in her beliefs and able to see the rigidity of rules that make it so hard to be fair."

A month after publication, Everything Is Fine Here was featured on CBC Radio's Bookends and then listed on CBC's "28 books that make great summer reads". It has also been nominated for the 2026 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. Tushabe is surprised by all the attention. "I hadn't expected it at all," she says. "With your first novel, you put it out into the world and hope for maybe four events, and that's it."

A few months later, Tushabe found herself in Uganda at the 2025 Kampala Writes Litfest held at Makerere University on the topic of belonging. The festival organizers fought hard for her to attend, despite the anti-homosexuality legislation. In the end, the government-funded university approved Tushabe's attendance but censored her novel. Hers was the only event of the festival that took place off campus. "It was hard for me to navigate. I'm at this institution of higher learning attending a festival on the theme of belonging where my book is not allowed," she says. "But I got to spend time with queer people who are living their lives and who are happy to have a book that centres their experiences, showing that queer people are here; we belong here. Of all the events I have done, it was the most important for me to bring the book home to Uganda. I felt very fulfilled and immensely grateful to the festival organizers."

This isn't the first time Tushabe has received major recognition for her writing. She won the City of Regina Writing Award in 2020 and 2024, was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021, and won The Journey Prize which, in 2023, recognized the year's best short story by an emerging Black writer. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Briarpatch, Prairies North, Adda, The Walrus, and in the trace press anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation. Her short fiction has been published in Grain Magazine, the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology Series, and has been included in The Journey Prize Stories: The Best of Canada's New Writers (Volumes 30 and 33.) Her latest story, "rapture", appeared in Grain's 200^th issue this fall.

These days, Tushabe is writing a memoir that follows naturally from the novel. "It's full of the animals and landscapes that were part of where I grew up. I grew up with monkeys, baboons, and chimpanzees as my neighbours-that was a big part of how I experienced the world," she says. Her family was evicted from their village when the government redrew the borders in order to create Kibale National Park. "I want to consider how the creation of national parks separates us from nature," she says. "We are nature. We don't have to be removed from our customary lands, become homeless in cities, and then we can't even afford the entry fees to go to national parks on weekends."

Tushabe continues to be surprised by the public's reception to Everything Is Fine Here. "I like to hear what readers are taking away from the book," she says "Every day, people write to me and tell me about moments I'd forgotten were in the book. I hadn't expected that it would bear this much fruit for me and bring me so much joy."

Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road
Ken Wilson
University of Regina Press
Released October 2025

For some people, walking is a meditation; for Ken Wilson MFA '17, PhD '23, it is a way to heighten his senses, think about his relationship with the land and follow the different paths those thoughts take him. In his first book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, he takes the reader on that journey with him. As the title states, Wilson walked along the Regina Bypass, 70 kilometres of bleak pavement, over the course of two-and-a-half days. He did this as research for his PhD project in 2020. His original project was to walk across the lands of Treaty 4-from Cypress Hills, AB, to Fort Qu'Appelle, SK-but the pandemic threw a wrench into that plan.

"To do that walk, I would have needed a lot of support-grocery stores and hotels or motels would need to be open. When all that shut down with pandemic, I didn't know what to do; I had already invested several years into this topic," he explains. Like many people, Wilson did a lot of walking during lockdown. Unlike many people, his walks were extensive, taking him from his home in the Cathedral neighbourhood to the edges of the city and beyond. One such walk was to the Regina Indian Industrial School Cemetery on Pinkie Road. As he was paying his respects to the children who had died while attending the school, he noticed semi-trucks gliding on the Bypass in the distance. He got curious about the highway, its origins, its purpose and how it relates to the land, and Walking the Bypass was born.

Wilson has long been drawn to walking. As an undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, frustrated by consistently late public transit, he would walk rather than wait for the bus. When he lived in Toronto, he did a lot of walking as well. But his serious interest began in 2013, when he walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, a 1,000-kilometre trek. Upon his return, he sought out longer walks closer to home, joining with likeminded folks to walk from Battleford to Swift Current in 2017, for example. He also began walking from Cathedral to the University, where he teaches English courses, averaging 12.5 kilometres a day. Walking long distances has had a major impact on Wilson's life. He lost 100 pounds and no longer has sleep apnea or high blood pressure; the latter runs in his family, so he assumed he would never be rid of it. The effects go beyond the physical, however. "Walking can be an aesthetic, political, recreational, and mental health act," he says. "Walking can be a performance even if there is no audience."

Walking on the side of a highway is very different from walking the Camino de Santiago. As part of his PhD research, Wilson looked into the idea of "non-places"-locations like the side of the highway, fast food restaurants and airport lounges-places you pass through. However, places that some of us see as non-places are places for others-the employees at those airports or fast-food restaurants, for example. Wilson's first research question was, "When I walk on a highway, can I turn that non-place into a place?" The answer? "Yes, temporarily," he says. "There's a circle of placeness around us wherever we go." His second question came out of a conversation with poet Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe about the Cree word, wâhkôhtowin, which means a kinship or connection with everything around us. Wilson explains, "You have a hard time experiencing that connection when you're walking down a grid road. It's easier to do in the grasslands or forest. Louise said to me, 'You're looking at this all wrong. There is the sky, wind, air, and clouds there, there's so much that remains of the natural world.' I thought about that a lot. It's really hard to come to a connection with location on the paved shoulder of a freeway, but it's not entirely impossible."

The book is meticulously researched yet accessible, combining observations of what Wilson sees along the way with personal observations and insights, settler and Indigenous history, environmentalism, contemporary politics and much more. The main focus is on the land and the relationship settlers have with it. "We have an ethical obligation to understand our relationship to this place and to the people who were here before us. If the term 'reconciliation' is to mean anything, it has to go beyond land acknowledgements and wearing orange T-shirts on September 30," he says "We need to be open to rethinking a lot of things, including what we think the treaties mean. We need to listen closely to the First Nations experience and what they think the treaties mean. Because the stories told about treaties on the two sides-First Nations and the federal government-is very different."

Walking the Bypass is rooted in a place-Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Treaty 4 Territory-but it contains universal messages, which is why its first two reviews-one from Harper's Magazine based in New York City and another by Phil Smith in the UK-were raves. It has also received accolades closer to home: in 2022, the manuscript won the City of Regina Writing Award.

Wilson chose the University of Regina Press as his publisher not only because the book is so local, but also because it is a hybrid between creative non-fiction and academic writing. "Because it is an academic press, they send the book out to readers before it's published. One of the readers asked some really good questions, and the answers made the book so much better," he notes.

Wilson hopes people who pick up his book will get a new perspective on the city and on where settlers are situated in relation to ongoing history. "I hope they get a sense of how a really bleak and difficult place like the side of a freeway can also be quite beautiful. There are stories there. There is no non-place. If you're there and in it and open to it, it has things to teach you."

[post_title] => Rooted in Story [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => fall2025 [post_name] => rooted-in-story [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-11-27 16:02:31 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-11-27 22:02:31 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.degreesmagazine.ca/?p=9670 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9686 [post_author] => 20 [post_date] => 2025-11-25 09:45:09 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-11-25 15:45:09 [post_content] =>

For more than 50 years, the Pit has been a cherished gathering place for our campus community. Now, it returns brighter, more accessible, and more versatile than ever before.

Guided by consultations on design, accessibility, and student-focused spaces, the revitalization reflects the needs of today's campus community and enhances the student experience. With flexible seating, improved lighting, additional power outlets, and expanded event capacity, the reimagined Pit supports everything from quiet study sessions and small classes to performances and community gatherings.

The revitalization was made possible through the generosity of donors, alumni, retirees, faculty, and friends. Among its major supporters is alumnus Greg Bamford BAdmin'00, whose contribution honours the legacy of his father, Dave Bamford-the former U of R Director of Budgets and Resource Planning who helped shape many key projects across campus.

"I'm so excited to help ensure this communal space remains for future generations to enjoy-a space that will witness many unforgettable memories being made and woven into its walls," Bamford says.

Greg Bamford BAdmin'00 and family.

As part of the University's ongoing commitment to truth and reconciliation, the revitalization also introduces a visible and lasting Indigenous presence through the artwork of Larissa Kitchemonia, an artist from The Key First Nation and a graduate of both the First Nations University of Canada and the University of Regina.

"It's important that Indigenous students see themselves reflected in the spaces where they learn and gather. When Indigenous art and stories are visible on our campuses, it sends a clear message that Indigenous people are present," says Lori Campbell, Associate Vice-President of Indigenous Engagement.

In addition to Kitchemonia's artwork, artists Sean Whalley and Grace Boyd from the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance created Echoes Between Centre, a steel sculpture in celebration of the University's 50^th anniversary.

 

Grace Boyd and Sean Whalley MFA'01 from the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance. Cadmus Delorme BAdmin'13, MPA'16, University Chancellor; Larissa Kitchemonia BFA'19, artist; and Lori Campbell BA'95, BA'05, MAEd'16, Associate Vice-President, Indigenous Engagement

"By investing thoughtfully in the spaces that bring us together, we enhance the student experience and create vibrant places for connection and learning," says Dr. Jeff Keshen, President and Vice-Chancellor. "The revitalization of this iconic space shows both current and future students that the University of Regina is a welcoming, inclusive, and accessible place, ready to support them today and for generations to come."

With its revitalization complete, the AdHum Pit will continue to serve as a central hub for student life, learning, and community for decades to come.

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